SOME TIME IN THE 1960s I was walking along Orange Street, which is behind the National Gallery, to visit Pickering & Chatto, the antiquarian booksellers. The proprietor was Dudley Massey, celebrated as one of the best bookmen of his generation. As I walked, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to revive the original imprint of William Pickering, who founded the firm in 1820. He invented cloth bindings and published Coleridge, Malthus, William Blake and the first collected edition of Christopher Marlowe.

In 1981, after Dudley’s death, I bought Pickering & Chatto from his heirs, partly with this publishing project in mind. For ten years I enjoyed antiquarian bookselling, yet it is a difficult business since every book sold has to be replaced; each transaction is a one-off. In the early 1990s I sold the antiquarian book business. However, I kept my interest in the revived publishing company that I had set up in 1983. I am now a non-executive chairman.

We adopted much the same academic publishing model as William Pickering had pioneered. He was particularly interested in collected editions of major authors and we have published a series of his masters, including previously uncollected women authors such as Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Currently we are publishing a collected Daniel Defoe in 43 volumes. The added value of these editions is that they are fully edited and appropriately indexed and often include original material. Our main market is the 2,000 major university libraries of the world and since Harvard has purchased well over half our books, we have clearly been reaching our market. We are small, independent, we employ a staff of ten and we generate a modest but positive cash flow.

We publish works of scholarship that larger publishers, with higher overheads, find uneconomic. More than half our annual sales come from our back list. This sturdy, early 19th-century business model is now threatened by a giant 21st-century business model, the omnivorous Google.

When we started there was, effectively, no internet. We had to prove that our model of scholarly publishing could survive in the competitive world of the 1980s against the big publishers. After that, we had to survive the first electronic revolution, which turned out to be more helpful than otherwise, both in costs and international marketing. Now we have to survive Google, the super-search engine that may be creating the second electronic revolution. We are a minnow that had lived comfortably for 25 years with piranhas and sharks, but now has to find a way of cohabiting with a killer whale.

Academic publishing is an essential part of the chain of higher education. Together with a relatively small number of similar publishers of edited texts and scholarly monographs, of which outside the sciences the major university presses are the largest, we provide the opportunity for advances in scholarship to be published. This is not a bookshop market. It is largely a postgraduate library market, which means it is quite small.

Google has reached agreement with a number of major libraries to scan their whole collections; these include Stanford and Harvard and two British copyright libraries, the British Museum and the Bodleian, which receive all locally published books free. Indeed, Pickering & Chatto subsidises the five copyright libraries by about £45,000 a year in free books, a significant cost for a small publisher. Of course, the British Library does not acquire the copyright as well as the free books.

Obviously Google has every right to republish books that are out of copyright. The question concerns books that are still in copyright and will remain so for 70 years or more. If Google can scan these books, without the permission of the publisher, and include them in its database, then most libraries will not need to buy them. And if librarians do not buy them, they cannot be published. The whole world of learning will be damaged, and academic publishing will cease to be a viable business.

There are other problems. Our books are designed for the archival market. They are stitched, on acid-free paper, with durable cloth bindings. They will last for centuries. Electronic systems of storage have no such archival reliability. Books are designed to be read at length. Bill Gates himself admits that he resorts to a printout after reading a few pages on screen. There is no problem about producing electronic books for those who prefer them; indeed, some of our books are published in electronic form. The problem is essentially one of copyright and its attendant revenue consequences. Can Google scan and extract books that are still in copyright without payment to the copyright owner?

In Saturday’s Times Andrew Wylie, the literary agent, suggested that a solution could emerge from current litigation in the United States. The Association of American Publishers has applied for an injunction against Google, on the grounds that Google plans to invade its intellectual property rights.

The purpose of this application is to force Google to charge for viewing a copyright book, and to share the profit. Random House, the US publisher, suggests that a book might be downloaded for five cents per page, one cent for the website and four cents to be split between the publishers and author. There would probably have to be some minimum charge.

Obviously, there is a strong case for the universal library that Google wants to create. No one wants to stand in the way of the diffusion of knowledge. But the cost would be too high if the future publication of books, particularly learned books, was prejudiced. I am an interested party, at the interface between university authors and university libraries. So far as I am concerned, Google must accept the rights in intellectual property. The survival of the book depends on that.

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